


rebuild

by historymiss



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 13:08:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1429708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He puts himself back together. After all he’s done, he could not ask anyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	rebuild

_Two hours_

Leaving the man on the banks of the Potomac was hard. Staying with him would have been harder. He walks away, one foot in front of the other. The air is thick with smoke and sirens, but the sun, it seems, will conquer the clouds, and the watery light will spread. It’s going to be a nice day. He finds a vantage point, some place to sit and watch the man in the red, white and blue uniform, and waits until he is taken away. Then, satisfied, he simply sits. The sun, as predicted, clears the smoke. 

Light plays on the water, until it doesn’t. 

_Five hours_

His instincts save him. Blown op, his brain whispers, and he gets up, moving like a sleepwalker through the trees, and startles a vagrant who runs off, leaving his shopping cart and, luckily, a coat to cover the bionic arm, a hat to pull down low over his eyes, and gloves to tug on over metal fingers that have taken on the night’s chill. 

He returns to an empty room in an empty building, a cage door that’s gaping open and a set of screens that flicker and dance. He sits on the chair, as he has been trained to, and waits for the inevitable consequences of his failure. 

Without orders, what else can he do?

_Seven hours_

(unaccustomed to exhaustion, he dreams waking phantoms of endless falls, his voice ripped from him in a scream that tangles in every corner of his brain, mismatched hands clawing at the frozen air. He wakes breathless, raw, and shies away from the gleaming hand that he raises to his face)

_Twelve hours_

For the first time in fifty years, he is hungry. He gets up. He walks to the door. He stands there. 

Movements jangling like clockwork in his brain, he walks out of the room. Failed. He screws his eyes tight against the sudden sunlight of the street, the dissatisfaction at this so foreign that he stands for a moment and relishes it, this feeling all his own. Until a passing bus shows him the face of the man in the river. 

He takes in the writing quickly, new information, to be processed and stored for the mission. Exhibition. Location. Subject.

Not yet.

_Two days_

The woman at the shelter is kind. Everyone at the shelter is kind. He doesn’t have to talk, and he doesn’t have to remove his coat, and he can fill himself with warm soup and bread that tastes only slightly stale, and too-sweet orange drink from a styrofoam cup. 

He remembers another place like this. Too many people and bad food. Insistent voices showing him how to use a rifle, a knife, telling him to fight for his country. 

No, not right- for a cause. 

It doesn’t matter. He huddles down around his bowl and lifts the plastic spoon to his mouth, letting the conversation wash over him. Some words catch, and the words form sentences that align, jaggedly, in his mind, into shards of memory that hurt. He’s never been afraid before, but fear is what he feels now: a clench in his gut that he probes like a freshly-formed scab. None of his orders deal with fear. He has to improvise.

_Three days_

Security’s easy to cheat.  His newly-found sense of humour finds it funny to look back at the metal detectors, his hands in his pockets, and smirk at his own cleverness (never could resist a chance to show off, huh, whispers a voice fifty years dead). 

It’s a slow day. Captain America’s not as fashionable as he once was, and the schools have somewhere better to be. The rooms are hushed and dark, and walking in them feels like walking in a dream. The air smells like dust, and iron, and somewhere he catches the memory of a forest frozen in winter, pine needles and clean air and smoke. 

The man in the photographs is the man on the bridge, and he stands next to black and white ghosts that tickle on the edge of memory and smiles. He finds his face smiling too. 

He is alone enough to trace a finger over the white letters that spell a name. James Buchanan Barnes. As names go, it’s not much to rebuild from.

But it’s a place to start.


End file.
